CHAPTER SIX The Great Hunger: Matussiv and Lukovytsya
The decree required that the peasants of the Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban be put to death by starvation, put to death along with their little children.
– Vasiliy Grossman, 1955
MARIA PAVLIVNA KURYNO, crabbed and shrunken as a Pompeii mummy, has lived in Matussiv all her life. Her cottage has two rooms and a clay floor and smells of horse. On the wall, papered with mismatched offcuts stuck on with drawing-pins, hangs a photograph of her husband, black-bordered and framed in tin foil. He disappeared fifty years ago, somewhere on the Eastern Front. Now Maria spends her days on the warm ledge above the clay stove, dozing or watching the television that stands beneath the icons in the corner. Her daughter and granddaughter are there too – a stout middle-aged woman in a muzhik’s padded jacket, and a wide-eyed little girl who chews the end of her blonde pony-tail and ducks her head when we try to take a photograph. It takes a while to make ourselves understood.
‘Babka, there’s someone to see you, a foreigner, from Angliya.’
‘Is she really an English girl – really, really foreign? You mustn’t photograph me – look at me, I look like a monkey! I read somewhere that Ukraine borders England . . .’
‘And this one’s from Kanada.’
‘From Amerika!’
Roma shrugs her shoulders.
‘Yes, from Amerika!’
Maria wears a scarf over her yellow-white hair and a nylon dress held together with safety-pins. As she talks she crosses herself again and again. She was twelve years old when ‘Nicholas’s war’ began and fifteen at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. She can remember reaping corn with her sisters in her family’s one-and-a-half-acre field, while the daughters of the local big house rode round on horseback. ‘You’d cut five sheaves, keep one, and the other four would go to the Lopukhins,’ she says. ‘But it wasn’t so bad – at least they paid.’ Neighbours worked in the local beet refinery, owned by the Brodskys, the Jewish sugar magnates who endowed, among many other good works, the Bessarabka covered market in Kiev. The village had twice as many inhabitants then, and real shops where you could actually buy things: ‘Jewish magazinchiki. You could say – bring a bag of flour, and they would bring white or brown, right to your house, whatever you wanted.’
After the Revolution, Maria’s memory gets muddled. Bandyty came and took people away – to the North ‘where they built a canal, poor people’, or to the woods, where they were shot and buried in pits. When was this? Who was doing the shooting? ‘Ah, they were just bandits – such bandits.’
Matussiv’s undoing, like that of thousands of other villages in central and eastern Ukraine, was not war or revolution but collectivisation, and the massive famine – the ‘Great Hunger’ – which followed it. Finding Ukrainians who are willing and able to talk about the famine is surprisingly hard. The younger generations have been told little about it by their parents and grandparents, for fear that such talk might compromise their careers, even their lives. ‘It just wasn’t something we talked about in our family’ was a typical comment from Kiev friends. The old, who remember the famine at first-hand, are dying off fast, and do not like confiding in strangers.
My problem was solved by my interpreter, Sergey Maksimov. A gentle, bearded man in his early forties, he was grotesquely overqualified for his job. He had written a thesis on ‘Deictic Markers as Linguistic Means of Expressing Authority in Text’ at Birmingham University, could read manuscripts in ancient Goth, and knew the whereabouts of every Scythian gravemound and ruined monastery in the country. But his teaching post at the Foreign Languages Institute only paid twenty dollars a month, so he was happy to spend hours with me in parliament translating dull debates. His lifeline – the place where he went to croon John Lennon and contemplate life – was his dacha at Lukovytsya, a village a couple of hours down the Dnieper by hydrofoil. His neighbour Hanna Hrytsay was a proper villager, not a dachnik, and would be happy to talk.
A spry, scrubbed old woman with pink cheeks and silver hair done up in a bun, Hanna looked as though she had stepped straight out of a fairy-tale. The whitewashed walls of her cottage were festooned with scythes, wicker baskets, enamel pots, old cartwheels and useful bits of rope and leather. Every inch of the half-acre plot behind was covered with immaculate rows of onions, sweetcom, potato-plants and tomatoes. One small barn, walled with hurdles, stored the last of the previous year’s hay; another, roofed with tarred cloth held in place by bricks hanging on wires from the roof tree, housed a brown-and-white cow with curly horns. Hanna said she would have preferred asbestos for the roof, but at a million coupons a sheet it was too expensive, and she and her husband were going to have to carry on making do with tar-paper. All Lukovytsya’s running water came from a single standpipe; like Matussiv, it had dirt roads, no shops, no public transport and, in winter, no postal service.
Hanna was seven years old when collectivisation began in 1929:
People didn’t want to enter these collective farms at all, but they were forced to. They took everything – land, grain, ploughs, animals. And as if that weren’t enough they took the bread out of the house. My grandfather was a blacksmith; he resisted for three years. They took his horses, his smith’s shop, they banged with hammers on the walls to see if he had hidden any grain. They even took the seedcorn for the next year. A barn or a stable was a symbol of wealth. If you had a metal roof on your house, you were considered a kulak, and sent away to the North. You know Tykhon’s house over the road – it had an iron roof. The only reason it wasn’t confiscated was because he was ill and had to have his leg amputated – the activists took pity on him.
The local church – ‘it was a beautiful one, with bells’ – was demolished and its icons looted. ‘People protested but it didn’t help. There was a man called Myron who lived right here – people used to go to his place to read the Bible and sing hymns. Then he disappeared too.’
Hanna’s family sold ‘everything – icons, clothes, pillows’ to buy rye. But by the winter of 1932 they were living off anything they could find. ‘People were eating straw and lime-tree leaves, making kasha out of bark, nettles. I went to see my uncle, and they served a dinner. There was a stew – I saw something strange – tails sticking out of it! It was made from mice!’ Compared to most villages, the Lukovytsyers were lucky, because they could trawl – illegally, using blankets – for fish and molluscs in the Dnieper. Even so, two families died. On the other side of the river things were much worse: ‘People were killing their children and eating them.’
The famine, though, was a long time ago. What Hanna really wanted to talk about were the iniquities of the present. A few years ago she and her husband had sold five cows and put the proceeds – 2,000 roubles, ‘half the price of a Volyn jeep in those days’ – into the bank. Hyperinflation had since reduced their value – the savings of a lifetime’s work – to absolutely nil: ‘not even enough to buy a box of matches’. They had been keeping the money for their funerals. Now they wished they had bought a refrigerator instead.
Exactly how many people died in the Great Hunger of 1932–3 is unclear. As Khrushchev admitted in his memoirs, ‘No one was keeping count’. Contemporaries spoke of 4 or 5 million. The historian Robert Conquest uses Soviet census data to arrive at a figure of 7 million: 5 million in Ukraine, 2 million elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Another 6.5 million, he reckons, died in ‘dekulakisation’ immediately beforehand. If Conquest is right, the whole operation killed over twice as many people as the Holocaust – thirty-four lives not for every word, but for every letter in this book. These may well be underestimates, since Soviet census data are unreliable. When the post-purge census of 1937 turned up an embarrassing population deficit, Stalin promptly had the officials in charge arrested and shot. Subsequent counts, one can assume, erred on the side of optimism.
The term ‘famine’, with its implication of natural disaster, is the wrong word for what happened. Unlike the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, the deaths of 1932–3 were a deliberate, man-made event. Crop failure was not to blame, since the harvest of 1932 was only slightly smaller than average, and actually better than that of the previous year. Nor can it, by any stretch of the imagination, be put down to bureaucratic oversight. By the early autumn of 1932 Stalin and his ministers undoubtedly knew, because local communists repeatedly told them so, that the countryside was starving, but ordered that food requisitions continue none the less. Right through the famine, storehouses full of ‘emergency supplies’ were kept locked and guarded, while people died in thousands in the villages round about. During the less serious famine of 1921–2 (also the result of grain requisitions), the Soviet government had allowed Western relief agencies to provide food aid; in the far worse conditions of 1932–3, it denied that famine existed at all.
The official explanation – seconded, until quite recently, by standard Western textbooks – was that collectivisation was a painful but necessary step towards modernising the rural economy, the famine something obdurate peasants brought upon themselves. ‘You can’t make an omelette,’ Stalin is said to have declared, ‘without breaking eggs.’ But even from this point of view, collectivisation was counter-productive: deporting all the country’s most successful farmers and starving the rest to death was hardly the way to go about boosting agricultural output, and Soviet farming has not really recovered from the blow even now. Like Stalin’s purges, which killed hundreds of thousands of stalwart Party supporters and most of the Red Army officer corps, the collectivisation famine of 1932–3 is so incredible, so seemingly self-defeating, that it is unsurprising that many historians have interpreted it as some sort of self-perpetuating blunder, a freak act of God.
The most convincing explanation for the famine is that it was a deliberate, genocidal attack on rural Ukraine. The groups the Bolsheviks most hated and feared, and had had most difficulty subduing during the Civil War, were the peasants and the non-Russian nationalities. The Ukrainian countryside – home to the Soviet Union’s largest and most turbulent ethnic minority and to its richest and most self-reliant peasantry – embodied these twin demons in one. For centuries visitors had contrasted Ukraine’s ‘smiling’ farmhouses, so clean that ‘a traveller might fancy himself transported to Holland’,1 with Russia’s rural hovels. Their prosperity was not only the result of a richer soil and milder climate, but of the fact that most Ukrainian farmland was individually owned by independent smallholders, whereas Russian land was held communally, and periodically redistributed by councils of village elders. Communism – which to the peasant meant collectivisation – was thus even less popular in Ukrainian villages than in Russian ones. By 1928 there was one Party member per hundred and twenty-five peasant households in the Soviet Union as a whole, compared to only one per thousand in Ukraine.2 When Stalin ordered collectivisation, Ukraine was where it encountered most resistance and where it was enforced most harshly. Though there was also widespread famine in the Russian Kuban (where many Ukrainians also lived), and among the Kazakhs, Don Cossacks and Volga Germans, proportionately higher grain quotas in Ukraine ensured that it bore the bulk of deaths. ‘Truly, truly,’ wrote Vasiliy Grossman in his autobiographical novel Forever Flowing, ‘the whole business was much worse in the Ukraine than it was with us.’3
The attack on Ukraine was a reversal of policy for the regime. In the mid-1920s the official line towards ethnic minorities was korenizatsiya or ‘taking root’. Korenizatsiya meant encouraging non-Russian languages and cultures (though not political organisations), with the aim of broadening communism’s appeal. Ukrainian-language books and newspapers were printed in large numbers, and hundreds of new Ukrainian-language schools opened, under the aegis of Mykola Skrypnyk, a close friend of Lenin’s and one of the few Ukrainians with a senior post in the Ukrainian Communist Party at the time. It was at one of these that Petro Hryhorenko, a Soviet army general who turned dissident in the 1960s, ‘first saw and heard played the Ukrainian national musical instrument, the bandore. From them I learned of Kobzar, written by the great Ukrainian poet Taras Grigoryevich Shevchenko. And from them I learned that I belonged to the same nationality as the great Shevchenko, that I was Ukrainian.’4 Even Party officials were made to take courses in the language and use it in government business. Viktor Kravchenko, an aeronautics student at the Kharkiv Technological Institute, described how korenizatsiya shook up the education system:
Another dimension of confusion was added to our life in the Institute soon after I entered by an order that all instruction and examinations be conducted in the Ukrainian language, not in Russian. The order applied to all schools and institutions. It was Moscow’s supreme concession to the nationalist yearnings of the largest non-Russian Soviet Republic.
In theory we Ukrainians in the student body should have been pleased. In practice we were as distressed by the innovation as the non-Ukrainian minority. Even those who, like myself, had spoken Ukrainian from childhood, were not accustomed to its use as a medium of study. Several of our best professors were utterly demoralised by the linguistic switch-over. Worst of all, our local tongue simply had not caught up with modern knowledge; its vocabulary was unsuited to the purposes of electrotechnics, chemistry, aerodynamics, physics and most other sciences.5
Notwithstanding Kravchenko’s misgivings, korenizatsiya was a success. It taught thousands of peasants to read and write – in Ukrainian – for the first time, and produced a brief literary renaissance. Ukrainian had its Symbolists, its Modernists, its Neoclassicists and its satirists, many of whom exercised their wit on the korenizatsiya programme itself. One of the most popular was Ostap Vyshnya, who lampooned his countrymen under the name ‘Chukrainians’:
There were lots of Chukrainians – more than thirty million of them, although most didn’t know themselves who they were. If someone asked them ‘what’s your nationality?’ they would scratch their heads and answer ‘God knows – we live in Shengeriyivka, we’re Orthodox’ . . . Academics say that ancient Chukrainians covered their milk pots with poetry books – proof of how highly developed their culture was even then . . .
But even at its height, korenizatsiya never meant intellectual freedom. Kravchenko recalled a friend pointing at some public toilets, signed ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ in Ukrainian, and hissing, ‘There’s the whole of our national autonomy!’ The former Rada president, Hrushevsky, was lured back to the Soviet Union in 1924 with the offer of a chair at the Kiev Academy of Sciences, only to find himself tailed day and night by the OGPU, the Bolshevik secret police. An American visitor who had applied for a job at the faculty was shocked to find that Hrushevsky took this for granted, and went straight back home again. He was right to be nervous: the OCPU had already drawn up lists of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to be dealt ‘a crushing blow when the time comes’. These ranged from all ex-members of defunct Ukrainian organisations to shopkeepers, traders, ‘all foreigners’ and ‘all those with relatives or acquaintances abroad’.6
The ‘crushing blow’ – and the end of korenizatsiya – came with the first Stalin purges. What collectivisation was to the countryside, the purges were to the towns, the two running side by side through the late 1920s and early ‘30s. In Ukraine the purges started early, with the arrest in July 1929 of some 5,000 members of a fictitious underground organisation, the ‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine’. The following spring a series of show trials kicked off with the pillorying of forty-five Ukrainian writers, scholars, lawyers and priests in the Kharkiv opera house. (Close to the Russian border, Kharkiv was republican capital from 1922 to 1934; if it had remained so a few years longer, more of Kiev’s churches might have been spared demolition.) The following year the OGPU ‘uncovered’ another conspiracy, putting Hrushevsky at its head. Though Hrushevsky himself was only exiled to Moscow, many of his colleagues and almost all his students were sent to the camps or shot. At the same time the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which had re-formed in the early 1920s, was disbanded and its clergy deported.
With the arrival of Stalin’s new viceroy, Pavel Postyshev, in January 1933, the purges intensified. Postyshev denounced korenizatsiya as a ‘cultural counter-revolution’ whose aim was to fan ‘national enmity’ and ‘isolate Ukrainian workers from the positive influence of Russian culture’.7 Entire commissariats, judicial boards, university faculties, editorial departments, theatre groups and film studios were duly arrested and sent to their deaths. Several hundred of Ukraine’s wandering bards, the kobzars, were summoned to a conference and never seen again. Skrypnyk, the Old Bolshevik in charge of Ukrainian-language education, committed suicide at his desk, using a revolver he had kept hidden since Civil War days. At the same time, Postyshev set about decimating the Ukrainian Communist Party itself, on the ironic grounds that it had showed insufficient ‘Bolshevik vigilance’ during collectivisation. By the end of the year, it had lost 100,000 members. As Postyshev’s report to Stalin of November 1933 boasted, ‘almost all the people removed were arrested and put before the firing-squad or exiled’.8
Between 1937 and 1939 a third wave of terror swept the whole of the Soviet Union. Victims spanned all types: factory-workers and scientists, priests and atheists, shop-girls and Party wives. For every Party member arrested, six or seven non-Party members also went to the cells, where they were threatened or tortured into denouncing colleagues and neighbours. In one Kiev district sixty-nine people were denounced by one man; in Odessa, over a hundred.9 The victims’ actual identity mattered little, bald quotas for desired numbers of arrestees being imposed from above. Vera Nanivska, a Kiev friend, told me what happened to her grandparents:
One night – it happened all over the place under Stalin – they were warned by friends in the local soviet that they were on the list of tomorrow’s arrests. That night they left everything and fled, to another small town not very far away. You didn’t have to really hide because Stalin didn’t care about who was on the list and who was not on the list, it didn’t matter. What the Stalin regime cared about was the constant threat, the constant fear . . .
Ironically, the system allowed some genuine anti-Communists, like Vera’s grandparents, to fade into the background. Mykola Stasyuk, an ex-minister in the Rada government, took a job as a park attendant in Mariupol, surviving to become a partisan leader during the Second World War.10
Exactly how many people died in the purges is unclear. Conquest reckons that between 1937 and 1938, in the Soviet Union as a whole, 1 million people were executed, and 2 million died in labour camps, the total camp population at the end of the period being about 7 million, and the prison population another 1 million. Adam Ulam comes up with half a million people executed, and somewhere between 3 and 12 million sent to the camps. What percentage of these were Ukrainians we do not know. A mass grave of purge victims in the Bykivnya forest outside Kiev, rediscovered in the late 1980s, contains an estimated 200,000 bodies. Another at Vynnytsya, uncovered during the war underneath a Park of Culture and Recreation, holds at least 10,000, all shot in the back of the head. In Ukrainian villages, quite casually, one hears of other sites, forgotten by everyone but the locals, who themselves can’t quite remember who shot who, or why, or when. Faced with old battleaxes prone to rhapsodising about the good old days of the Soviet Union, I found that a failsafe riposte was to inquire gently whether any of their relatives had been ‘repressed’ under Stalin. The answer was invariably a grudging Yes.
Rural terror ran in three overlapping stages: food requisitioning, dekulakisation and mass starvation. In the spring of 1928, eighteen months before the first batch of Ukrainian intelligentsia were put on trial in Kharkiv, requisitioning brigades started appearing in the villages, the first time this had happened since the end of ‘War Communism’ seven years earlier. A group of activists, some local, some from nearby towns, would arrive, call a meeting, and demand ‘voluntary’ surrender of a certain quantity of grain or meat. The villagers, naturally, usually voted against. Thereupon the activists denounced the village spokesmen as counter-revolutionary kulaks, and put them under arrest or confiscated their property. The meeting was kept in session until the remainder changed their minds. The confiscations provoked widespread resistance – riots, looting and the murder of several hundred requisitioning agents.
The next stage, announced by Stalin in December 1929, was the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’.11 In practice, this meant the arrest and deportation of anybody who resisted collectivisation – that is to say, of any peasant who refused to give up his land, tools and livestock in favour of bonded labour at derisory wages on a state-owned farm run by a Party appointee. Singled out were richer peasants, priests, and those who could write or read – in other words, all the villages’ natural leaders. Like the purges, dekulakisation proceeded on a quota system. Provincial OGPU offices came up with a total of ‘kulaks’ to be ‘eliminated’, and distributed it among local troikas made up of a soviet member, a Party official and an OGPU man, for fulfilment as they pleased. Denunciations were encouraged, giving ample scope for malice. ‘It was so easy to do a man in,’ wrote Grossman. ‘You wrote a denunciation; you did not even have to sign it. All you had to say was that he had paid people to work for him as hired hands, or that he had owned three cows.’12 In some places, dekulakisation was only applied to heads of households, in others to entire families. Protests – very common – from local officials that there were simply no kulaks in their area were ignored.
In the winter of 1930–31, in the Kharkiv Technological Institute, the up-and-coming Komsomolyets Viktor Kravchenko started hearing something of what was going on:
Rumours of incredible cruelty in the villages in connection with the liquidation of the kulaks were passed from mouth to mouth. We saw long trains of cattle cars filled with peasants passing through Kharkov, presumably on their way to the tundras of the North, as part of their ‘liquidation’. Communist officials were being murdered in the villages and recalcitrant peasants were being executed en masse. Rumors also circulated about the slaughter of livestock by peasants in their ‘scorched earth’ resistance to forced collectivisation. A Moscow decree making the unauthorised killing of livestock a capital crime confirmed the worst of these reports.
The railroad stations of the city were jammed with ragged, hungry peasants fleeing their homes. ‘Bezprizorni’, homeless children, who had been so much in evidence in the civil war and famine years were again everywhere. Beggars, mostly country people but also some city people, again appeared on the streets.
The press told glorious tales of accomplishment. The Turkestan-Siberian railway completed. New industrial combinats opened in the Urals, in Siberia, everywhere. Collectivization 100 per cent completed in one province after another. Open letters of ‘thanks’ to Stalin for new factories, new housing projects . . .
Which was the reality, which the illusion? The hunger and terror in the villages, the homeless children – or the statistics of achievement?13
Transferred to the Metallurgy Institute in Dnipropetrovsk, his doubts grew. Arriving home one evening, he was surprised to find a small girl, ‘grey with exhaustion and prematurely old’, squatting by the radiator pipes on the kitchen floor. She was called Katya, his mother told him, and she had come begging to the door. After supper she told her story:
We lived in Pokrovnaya. My father didn’t want to join the kolkhoz. All kinds of people argued with him and took him away and beat him but still he wouldn’t go in. They shouted he was a kulak agent . . . We had a horse, a cow, a heifer, five sheep, some pigs and a barn. That was all. Every night the constable would come and take papa to the village soviet. They asked him for grain and didn’t believe that he had no more . . . For a whole week they wouldn’t let father sleep and they beat him with sticks and revolvers till he was black and blue and swollen all over . . .
Then one morning . . . strangers came to the house. One of them was from the GPU and the chairman of our soviet was with him too. Another man wrote in a book everything that was in the house, even the furniture and our clothes and pots and pans. Then wagons arrived and everything was taken away . . .
Mamochka, my dear little mother, she cried and prayed and fell on her knees and even father and big brother Valya cried and sister Shura. But it did no good. We were told to get dressed and take along some bread and salt pork, onions and potatoes, because we were going on a long journey . . .
They put us all in the old church. There were many other parents and children from our village, all with bundles and all weeping. There we spent the whole night, in the dark, praying and crying, praying and crying. In the morning about thirty families were marched down the road surrounded by militiamen. People on the road made the sign of the cross when they saw us and also started crying.
At the station there were many other people like us, from other villages. It seemed like thousands. We were all crushed into a stone barn but they wouldn’t let my dog Volchok come in though he’d followed us all the way down the road. I heard him howling when I was inside in the dark.
After a while we were let out and driven into cattle cars, long rows of them, but I didn’t see Volchok anywhere and the guard kicked me when I asked. As soon as our car was filled up so that there was no room for more, even standing up, it was locked from the outside. We all shrieked and prayed to the Holy Virgin. Then the train started. No one knew where we were going. Some said Siberia, but others said no, the far North or even the hot deserts.
Near Kharkov my sister Shura and I were allowed out to get some water. Mama gave us some money and a bottle and said to try and buy some milk for our baby brother who was very sick. We begged the guard so long that he let us go out which he said was against his rules. Not far away were some peasant huts so we ran there as fast as our feet would carry us.
When we told these people who we were they began to cry. They gave us something to eat right away, then filled the bottle with milk and wouldn’t take the money. Then we ran back to the station. But we were too late and the train had gone away without us.14
A few weeks later Kravchenko found himself collectivising in person. Eighty young activists were summoned to a pep talk by the local Party committee. Dnipropetrovsk region had fallen behind schedule, they were told. Kulaks were sabotaging livestock; the grain plan had not been fulfilled. What the local soviets needed was ‘an injection of Bolshevik iron’. This was no time for ‘squeamishness or rotten sentimentality’; they were to go forth and ‘act like Bolsheviks worthy of Comrade Stalin’.15
Kravchenko was despatched to Podgorodnoye, a large village not far from Dnipropetrovsk. Collectivisation had already reduced it to a shambles. Crops stood unharvested in the fields; farm machinery lay scattered about in the open, rusting and broken. Emaciated cattle wandered the farmyards, unfed and caked in manure. Kravchenko spent the next weeks persuading the peasants to bring in what remained of the harvest while his colleagues went about the business of grain requisitioning and further dekulakisation. He claims – not wholly convincingly – to have been profoundly surprised and shocked when he saw at firsthand just what their methods were:
Evening was falling when I drove into the village, with several companions. Immediately we realised that something was happening. Agitated groups stood around. Women were weeping. I hurried to the Soviet building.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked the constable.
‘Another round-up of kulaks,’ he replied. ‘Seems the dirty business will never end. The GPU and District Committee people came this morning.’
A large crowd was gathered outside the building. Policemen tried to scatter them, but they came back. Some were cursing. A number of women and their children were weeping hysterically and calling the names of their husbands and fathers. It was all like a scene out of a nightmare.
Inside the Soviet building, Arshinov was talking to a GPU official. Both of them were smiling, apparently exchanging pleasantries of some sort. In the back yard, guarded by GPU soldiers with drawn revolvers, stood about twenty peasants, young and old, with bundles on their backs. A few of them were weeping. The others stood there sullen, resigned, hopeless . . .
For some reason, on this occasion, most of the families were being left behind. Their outcries filled the air. As I came out of the Soviet house again, I saw two militiamen leading a middle-aged peasant. It was obvious that he had been manhandled – his face was black and blue and his gait was painful; his clothes were ripped in a way indicating a struggle.
As I stood there, distressed, ashamed, helpless, I heard a woman shouting in an unearthly voice. Everyone looked in the direction of her cry and a couple of GPU men started running towards her. The woman, her hair streaming, held a flaming sheaf of grain in her hands. Before anyone could reach her, she had tossed the burning sheaf on to the thatched roof of the house, which burst into flame instantaneously.
‘Infidels! murderers!’ the distraught woman was shrieking. ‘We worked all our lives for our house! You won’t have it. The flames will have it!’ Her cries turned suddenly into crazy laughter.
Peasants rushed into the burning house and began to drag out furniture. There was something macabre, unreal, about the whole scene – the fire, the wailing, the demented woman, the peasants being dragged through the mud and herded together for deportation. The most unearthly touch, for me, was the sight of Arshinov and the GPU officer looking on calmly, as if this were all routine, as if the burning hut were a bonfire for their amusement.16
The fate of the dekulakised peasants was similar to that of the purge victims. Herded into cattle-cars, they were transported across Russia to labour camps in Siberia, Central Asia and the far north. Deprived of food, heat or water, up to 20 per cent of deportees, especially old people and children, died on the way. One of the main transit points was Vologda, where the corpses were unloaded and the survivors crammed into empty churches. ‘In a little park by the station,’ an eyewitness wrote of another transit town,’ ‘dekulakised peasants from the Ukraine lay down and died. You got used to seeing corpses there in the morning; a wagon would pull up and the hospital stable-hand, Abram, would pile in the bodies. Not all died; many wandered through the dusty mean little streets, dragging bloodless blue legs, swollen from dropsy, feeling out each passer-by with doglike begging eyes . . .17
From the railheads, the peasants marched or rode in wagons to their final destinations deep in the forest or taiga. Husbands and wives were often split up with promises that they would be reunited later, never to see each other again. Some were put to work in mines and logging camps; others were dumped in the middle of nowhere and told to fend for themselves. A German communist described how in Kazakhstan, kulaks from Ukraine were simply abandoned in empty wilderness: ‘There were just some pegs stuck in the ground with little notices on them saying: Settlement No. 5, No. 6, and so on. The peasants were brought here and told that now they had to look after themselves. So then they dug themselves holes in the ground.’18
Many deportees, especially young men, escaped. Others managed to establish viable settlements, only to find themselves dekulakised all over again. But for most, deportation was equivalent to a death sentence. Conquest estimates that between 10 and 12 million peasants were dekulakised up to the spring of 1933, when mass deportation (though not that of individual families) was brought to an end, and that within two years about a third of them had died. ‘In hardly four months,’ wrote a survivor of a camp on the river Dvina, ‘it was necessary to construct several cemeteries . . . cemeteries so large that it would have taken a big European city several years to have as many.’19 When winter struck the arctic Magadan peninsula whole camps perished, down to the last guard and guard-dog.
Dekulakisation left the villages in ruins. For every group of deportees, at least half as many people again fled the countryside of their own accord. Though starvation had already set in by the spring of 1932, in July Stalin ordered that food requisitions continue:
They searched in the house, in the attic, shed, pantry and the cellar. Then they went outside and searched in the bam, pig pen, granary and the straw pile. They measured the oven and calculated if it was large enough to hold hidden grain behind the brickwork. They broke beams in the attic, pounded on the floor of the house, tramped the whole yard and garden. If they found a suspicious-looking spot, in went the crowbar.20
In 1931 there had still been some grain to hide. By 1932 there was none. Under a decree defining all standing crops as state property, watchtowers were set up around the fields, manned by armed guards. Anyone spotted picking corn was arrested and deported or summarily shot, as was anyone still hiding food. ‘The alert eye of the GPU,’ ran a typical press announcement, ‘has uncovered and sent for trial the fascist saboteur who hid bread under a pile of clover.’ One thousand five hundred death sentences are reported from the Kharkiv court for one month alone. A woman was sentenced to ten years, writes Conquest, ‘for cutting a hundred ears of ripening com, from her own plot, two weeks after her husband had died of starvation. A father of four got ten years for the same offence. Another woman was sentenced to ten years for picking ten onions from collective land.’21
That autumn Kravchenko was again summoned to Party headquarters, and despatched with a friend to Petrovo, a village seventy-five miles west of Dnipropetrovsk. Their instructions were to organise the harvest. On arrival, they were struck by the ‘unearthly quiet’. All the village dogs, they were told, had been eaten. The next morning, they took a stroll:
Again we were oppressed by the unnatural silence. Soon we came to an open space which, no doubt, was once the market-place. Suddenly Yuri gripped my arm until it hurt: for sprawled on the ground were dead men, women and children, thinly covered with dingy straw. I counted seventeen. As we watched, a wagon drove up and two men loaded the corpses on the wagon like cord-wood.22
After a hearty meal with local Party officials, they did the rounds of the houses:
What I saw . . . was inexpressibly horrible. On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty. Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables . . .
The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes lingered the remainder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless.
We knocked at a door and received no reply. We knocked again. Fearfully, I pushed the door open and we entered through a narrow vestibule into the one-room hut. First my eyes went to an icon light above a broad bed, then to the body of a middle-aged woman stretched on the bed, her arms crossed on her breast over a clean embroidered Ukrainian blouse. At the foot of the bed stood an old woman, and nearby were two children, a boy of about eleven and a girl of about ten. The children were weeping quietly . . .
The nightmarishness of the scene was not in the corpse on the bed, but in the condition of the living witnesses. The old woman’s legs were blown up to incredible size, the man and the children were clearly in the last stages of starvation.23
By spring, people were eating anything they could find – grass, leaves, acorns, snails, ants and earthworms. They boiled up bones and leather, stripped the bark from the trees and fought over horse dung for undigested seeds. Suicide, murder and cannibalism were all common: ‘People cut up and cooked corpses,’ wrote Grossman; ‘they killed their own children and ate them.’24 Many poisoned themselves by digging up and eating diseased horse carcasses: one account has the perpetrators being shot by OGPU soldiers as they lay dying in bed.25
Peasants tried to escape the famine by fleeing to the cities. Though checkpoints were set up at railway stations and on the main roads, thousands managed to evade them, only to die ignored on the city streets. ‘People hurried about on their affairs,’ wrote Grossman of Kiev, ‘some going to work, some to the movies, and the streetcars were running – and there were the starving children, old men, girls, crawling among them on all fours.’26 Early each morning, carts collected the dead:
I saw one such flat-top cart with children lying on it. They were just as I have described them, thin elongated faces, like those of dead birds, with sharp beaks . . . Some of them were still muttering, their heads still turning. I asked the driver about them, and he just waved his hands and said: ‘By the time they get where they are being taken they will be silent too.’27
Similar carts went the rounds in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odessa and Poltava.
Grain collections were officially halted in March 1933, by which time about a fifth of the entire rural population – 5 million people – lay dead. The size of the death-roll varied widely village by village. In some only one in ten families died; elsewhere whole communities perished. The euphemism used on death certificates – when they were issued at all – was ‘exhaustion’. Where the bodies were too numerous for burial, squads of Komsomol members put up black flags and ‘no entry’ signs. William Chamberlin, Moscow correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, was one of the first foreign journalists to be allowed into the famine areas, in September 1933:
Quite by chance the last village we visited was at once the most terrible and the most dramatic. It is called Cherkass, and it lies about seven or eight miles to the south of Byelaya Tserkov, a Ukrainian town south-west of Kiev. Here the ‘normal’ mortality rate of 10 per cent had been far exceeded. On the road to the village, former ikons with the face of Christ had been removed; but the crown of thorns had been allowed to remain – an appropriate symbol for what the village had experienced. Coming into the village, we found one deserted house after another, with window-panes fallen in, crops growing mixed with weeds in gardens with no one to harvest them. A boy in the dusty village street called the death-roll among families he knew . . .
‘There was Anton Samchenko, who died with his wife and sister; three children were left. With Nikita Samchenko’s family, the father and Mikola and two other children died; five children were left. Then Grigory Samchenko died with his son Petro; a wife and daughter are left. And Gerasim Samchenko died with four of his children; only the wife is still living. And Sidor Odnorog died with his wife and two daughters; one girl is left. Gura Odnorog died with his wife and three children; one girl is still alive . . .’28
Chamberlin was appalled, conviced both that collectivisation failed to justify ‘organised famine’, and that the famine was intentional, ‘quite deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy’.29 Nor did he hesitate to say so, in a book published soon after he left the Soviet Union. But Chamberlin was an exception. Killing more people than the First World War on all sides put together, the famine of 1932–3 was, and still is, one of the most under-reported atrocities of human history, a fact that contributes powerfully to Ukraine’s persistent sense of victimisation.
The Soviet press, of course, denied that the famine existed at all. Arthur Koestler, living in Kharkiv in the ghastly winter of 1932–3, found not the slightest allusion to the disaster in the local papers:
Each morning when I read the Kharkov Kommunist I learned about plan-figures reached and over-reached, about competitions between factory shock brigades, awards of the Red Banner, new giant combines in the Urals, and so on; the photographs were either of young people, always laughing and always carrying a banner in their hands, or of some picturesque elder in Usbekistan, always smiling and always learning the alphabet. Not one word about the local famine, epidemics, dying out of whole villages . . .30
The Western press did little better. Despite a ban on foreigners leaving Moscow, the famine’s existence – though not its extent – was well known in the capital. ‘Few of us,’ wrote the United Press correspondent Eugene Lyons,
were so completely isolated that we did not meet Russians whose work took them to the devastated areas, or Muscovites with relations in those areas. Around every railroad station in the capital hundreds of bedraggled refugees were encamped, had we needed further corroboration . . .
There was no more need for investigation to establish the mere existence of the Russian famine than investigation to establish the existence of the American depression . . . The famine was accepted as a matter of course in our casual conversations at the hotels and in our homes.31
None the less, it went almost unmentioned in despatches, treated at best as a sideshow, a temporary hitch in collectivisation. Though occasional full and honest reports did appear, they were far outnumbered by the dishonest, penned by reporters who feared losing their contacts and their visas, or who simply found it more convenient to swallow the official propaganda. ‘Even conscientious newspapermen,’ wrote Koestler, ‘evolved a routine of compromise; they cabled no lies, but nolens volens confined themselves to official dope and expressed such comment or criticism as they dared “between the lines”, by some subtle qualifying adjective or nuance – which naturally passed unobserved by anybody but the initiated reader.’32 The result was a picture fatally distorted by half-truth, contradiction and doubt.
Lyons gives a graphic example of the reigning atmosphere of pusillanimity. The British journalist Gareth Jones, ‘an earnest and meticulous little man’, of the sort ‘who carries a note-book and unashamedly records your words as you talk’, had succeeded in making a secret tour of the Kharkiv area. On his return to London, he sent a detailed account of the horrors he encountered to the Manchester Guardian. The rest of the Moscow press corps duly received urgent requests from their editors for follow-ups. These coincided, however, with the opening of a sensational show trial of a group of British engineers, on charges of sabotage. ‘The need to remain on friendly terms with the censors,’ wrote Lyons, ‘was for all of us a compelling professional necessity. Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes – but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation.’ At a meeting with the chief censor, Konstantin Umansky, the journalists jointly worked out a ‘formula of denial’. ‘We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar. That filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and “zakuski”, Umansky joined the celebration, and the party did not break up until the early morning hours.’33
The evasions and omissions of the professional journalists were backed up by the naive fellow-travellers who came to the Soviet Union to admire the results of the first Five-Year Plan. For the marvellously acerbic Malcolm Muggeridge (another journalist who managed to travel through Ukraine during the famine, and reported what he saw), they were ‘one of the wonders of our age’:
There were earnest advocates of the humane killing of cattle who looked up at the massive headquarters of OGPU with tears of gratitude in their eyes, earnest advocates of proportional representation who eagerly assented when the necessity for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was explained to them, earnest clergymen who walked reverently through the anti-God museums and reverently turned the pages of atheistic literature, earnest pacifists who watched delightedly tanks rattle across the Red Square . . .34
The government tourist agency Voks laid on full-scale Potemkin tours of factories, schools, prisons and collectives, complete with singsongs, folk-dancing, politically correct film-shows and enormous banquets. Sometimes these were permanent establishments, kept especially for propaganda purposes; sometimes ordinary villages were dressed up for the occasion. An extraordinary account of the preparations made for the visit of the French Radical leader Edouard Herriot to the ‘October Revolution’ collective near Kiev in September 1933 is worth quoting at length:
It was thoroughly scrubbed and cleaned, all Communists, Komsomols and activists having been mobilized for the job. Furniture from the regional theatre in Brovary was brought, and the clubrooms beautifully appointed with it. Curtains and drapes were brought from Kiev, also tablecloths. One wing was turned into a dining-hall, the tables of which were covered with new cloths and decorated with flowers. The regional telephone exchange, and the switchboard operator, were transferred from Brovary to the farm. Some steers and hogs were slaughtered to provide plenty of meat. A supply of beer was also brought in. All the corpses and starving peasants were removed from the highways in the surrounding countryside and the peasants were forbidden to leave their houses. A mass meeting of collective farm workers was called, and they were told that a motion picture would be made of collective farm life, and for this purpose this particular farm had been chosen by a film-unit from Odessa. Only those who were chosen to play in the picture would turn out for work, the rest of the members must stay at home and not interfere. Those who were picked by a special committee were given new outfits brought from Kiev: shoes, socks, suits, hats, handkerchiefs . . . The next day, when Herriot was due to arrive, now well-dressed workers were seated in the dining-hall, and served a hearty meal. They were eating huge chunks of meat, washing it down with beer or lemonade, and were making short work of it. The director, who was nervous, called upon the people to eat slowly, so that the honoured guest, Herriot, would see them at their tables. Just then a telephone message came from Kiev: ‘Visit cancelled, wind everything up.’ Now another meeting was called. Shaparov thanked the workers for a good performance, and then Denisenko asked them to take off and return all the clothes that had been issued to them, with the exception of socks and handkerchiefs. The people begged to be allowed to keep the clothes and shoes, promising to work and pay for them, but to no avail. Everything had to be given back and returned to Kiev, to the stores from which it had been borrowed.35
When Herriot returned home, Pravda was able to report that he ‘categorically denied the lies of the bourgeois press about a famine in the Soviet Union’.
Speaking no Russian, closely chaperoned, and travelling on special trains, visitors came into almost no contact with ordinary homes, workplaces or people. Even those not already determined to turn a blind eye to any shortcomings they might stumble upon were easily misled. The travel-writer Robert Byron, no friend of the Soviet Union (his favourite amusement was to mutter the dread initials ‘GPU’ in public places, and observe the horrified reactions of passers-by), failed to notice anything amiss on a train journey through Ukraine in the horrible winter of 1932 save ‘a mob of maddened peasants’ at a wayside station.36
But for most visitors, the Potemkin tours were an unnecessary precaution. They had made up their minds before they arrived. George Bernard Shaw, capering around Moscow with Nancy Astor in the summer of 1931, told a banquet in his honour that he had thrown tins of food out of the train window on crossing the border from Poland, so sure was he that rumours of shortages were nonsense. At lunch at the Metropole next day, he was upbraided by Chamberlin’s wife. Waving a hand around the restaurant, Shaw asked, ‘Where do you see any food shortage?’37 Back in London he told a press conference he had not seen ‘a single undernourished person in Russia, young or old’. ‘Were they padded?’ he wanted to know; ‘Were their hollow cheeks distended by pieces of rubber inside?’38
Flattery was an important part of the package. Shaw was delighted to discover that the waitresses in his restaurant-car knew his work intimately and were longing to be introduced. The German socialist Lion Feuchtwanger, visiting Moscow in 1937, met ‘a young girl from the land, glowing with happiness’, who told him, ‘Four years ago I could neither read nor write, and today I can discuss Feuchtwanger’s books with him.’39 The tract Feuchtwanger wrote on his return exhorted his readers to ‘free themselves from their own conceptions of democracy’ and not to indulge in ‘carping, whining, and alarming’ at the Soviet Union’s expense, ending on a note of religious exaltation: ‘It does one good after all the compromise of the West to see an achievement such as this, to which a man can say “Yes,” “Yes,” “Yes,” with all his heart.’40 André Gide found the front pages plastered with his picture, and was told that sales of his latest book ran into the hundreds of thousands. He was given so much spending money that he did not know what to do with it: ‘Every time I got out my wallet to settle a restaurant or hotel bill, to pay a cheque, buy some stamps or a newspaper, I was brought up short by an exquisite smile and authoritative gesture from our guide: “You are joking! You are our guest, and your five companions with you.”’41
But the palm among apologists for the horrors of the 1930s goes to a journalist – Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Of all the correspondents who denied or played down the famine, he was by far the most cynical and influential. In November 1932, as the famine took grip, he reported that ‘there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be’.42 By March he had subtly changed his tune: ‘There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.’43 In August, in reply to a Herald Tribune piece estimating deaths at no less than 1 million, he wrote that ‘Any report of famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda’. ‘Food shortage’ had, however, ‘caused heavy loss of life’.44
In September 1933 foreign journalists were allowed into the famine areas for the first time. Duranty was given a fortnight’s start over the rest of the corps. When he came back, Lyons ran into him with a group of friends in a restaurant:
He gave us his fresh impressions in brutally frank terms and they added up to a picture of ghastly horror. His estimate of the dead from famine was the most startling I had as yet heard from anyone.
‘But Walter, you don’t mean that literally?’ Mrs McCormick exclaimed.
‘Hell I don’t . . . I’m being conservative,’ he replied, and as if by way of consolation he added his famous truism: ‘But they’re only Russians . . .’
Lyons was not surprised to find that Duranty’s articles on the trip failed even to acknowledge the famine’s existence. When Kravchenko defected to America and published the memoirs I have quoted here, the Western press accused him of being a CIA plant. Duranty’s payback was a Pulitzer Prize, awarded for the ‘scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgement and exceptional clarity’ of his reporting.45